Posts in Category: picture

The OlympusE-M5 and the E-P5 get a lot right. But they also try to be like other cameras a little too much. I would love to see Olympus make a camera that is a little more “serious”. When I say serious I mean more suited to a raw based workflow. For me this means:

Only the P, A, S and M modes. The others are never used, so just get rid of them so they don’t get in my way.

No JPEG engine, I just want raw and only raw.

No “art” filters or other kinds of effects.

Native ISO 100 to make working at high apertures easier. The high ISO battle has gone too far, a little give in the other direction would be appreciated.

No movie mode, I just do stills. If I want movies I’ll buy a black magic.

Responsive, I want it to fire the shutter at exactly the point when I hit the button.

Looking at this list, it is mostly about getting rid of the gimmicks. I want a camera to not get in the way and just capture the picture. I already know how to tell it what sensitivity, depth of field and shutter speed I want so it’s job at this point is to record the image when told.

As a second part to this wish list. Having two variants of the camera body, one colour and one monochrome, would be a cake well iced!

Lightroom 5 has now been released. But there is no word from Adobe about performance improvements. Too bad I’ve already had enough and migrated to Aperture. Most of the new features are playing “catch up” with Aperture, apart from the upright tool. But as I also own DxO this is of no advantage to me.

This is a tool I have used heavily in the past, so it saddens me that Adobe has come up with a release that is mediocre. Lightroom started life as a tool designed specifically for photographers. It has certainly made my life easier (until recent times) and became an industry “standard” as it was just as beneficial to others.

Over the years, Adobe’s desire to chase trends and cameras has meant that Lightroom has stayed rather mediocre. It has opened up a market for DxO to create an awesome raw image processing engine with lens corrections. Aperture has moved ahead by providing photographers with a better raw processor and tools that are needed (i.e. brushes on everything). Whilst Lightroom gets released with slight improvements and know performance issues.

This shouldn’t be that much of a big deal. But the reality is that you will invest more time in an application like this than you will behind the camera. Even though there are plenty of good options available, it is hard to shift an image library from one application to another.

I can only hope that Adobe can bring some customer focused sanity back to the equation and give photographers awesome tools again. But for me, I’ve settled quite well into my Adobe-free new world.